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Barry Norman's 101 greatest films: sci-fi

From Alien to Star Wars, our critic picks his favourite movies from cinema history

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3:25 PM, 30 January 2012

Alien 1979 18 116min Colour

Some prefer James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, but Ridley Scott’s original set the benchmark not only for the franchise but for numerous rip-offs. Screen debutante Sigourney Weaver found instant stardom as Ripley, intrepid crew member of a spacecraft invaded by an extremely scary alien monster. It’s dark, violent, full of Freudian undertones and includes one of the cinema’s great shock moments when the alien bursts out of John Hurt’s chest.

DID YOU KNOW? In the egg chamber sequence near the beginning of this science-fiction thriller, when Kane (played by John Hurt) is initially infected, the thin protective membrane covering the alien spawn was created using smoke and a pulsating scanning laser borrowed from the Who.

Bladerunner 1982 15 111min Colour

Ridley Scott again. In dank, menacing, futuristic Los Angeles, former cop (or blade runner) Harrison Ford hunts down a group of rebellious replicants, artificial humans with a built-in lifespan. Beneath all the action and Ford’s romantic interest in replicant Sean Young lies the question of what it means to be human and indeed who here is human. Scott fiddled with and improved the film five times up to 2007 when, hopefully, he was satisfied.

A lot of people seem to believe that the movies started with this one. They didn’t, but Star Wars was brilliantly innovative in combining pulp fiction with sci-fi. It’s a sort of western in space with its gun-toting heroes (Han Solo and company), its dark villain (Darth Vader), the evil Empire instead of ruthless cattle ranchers and spaceships replacing horses. Glorious stuff, thrilling and funny, that never seems to stop attracting new fans.

Don Siegel’s tale of alien pod people colonising the Earth by taking over the bodies of humans and dispensing with their souls, transcends its B-movie origins to become a classic study of paranoia, still better than any of the remakes. It’s thrilling, frightening and in a time of Hollywood blacklisting takes an ill-disguised swipe at McCarthyism and its horrors.

Stanley Kubrick’s engrossing, baffling, beautifully made film is sci-fi for grown-ups. What’s it about? All manner of things, the evolution of man for a start, the meaning of life and the possible existence of a Supreme Being. On a spaceship headed for the stars, the most important character is HAL, the arrogant robot that controls it, not the human crew. There’s very little tension but plenty of ideas and the special effects are spectacular even now. Not a film to everyone’s taste but one that should be seen.